Books I Listened To/Read In February

Fiction

'Life of Pi' by Yann Martell

I do not really know why I bought this book. I realised, however, that I had been misled by the images associated with it and the movie based on it, showing a boy and a tiger in a small, otherwise empty lifeboat. In fact they are aboard a lifeboat with room to hold 32 people and with sufficient supplies to feed them for months and equipment to, for example, purify sea water and catch fish. While the book does play around with what is fact and what is fiction, in reality, the set-up that dominates the book is less fantastical than the images make it appear. Much of the narrative is about practical steps that the protagonist takes not only to survive months at sea but also to control the tiger on the large boat with him.

The book focuses on Piscine Molitor 'Pi' Patel born in the early 1960s to a zoo owner and his wife in Pondicherry in India. The first part of the book seems very detached from the bulk of the novel and details Pi's childhood and how he ended up following Christianity, Islam and Hinduism simultaneously. Though the book tells the reader it is about God, aside from some mention of prayers, this element is forgotten as the book moves into its main part. More important are the lessons in animal psychology that Pi gains from his father.

The main part of the story begins when Pi is 16 and is emigrating with his family from Pondicherry to Canada, in response to the regime of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Pi's father owned a zoo in Pondicherry and with them are many of the animals which have been sold to zoos in North America. The ship sinks and Pi is the only human survivor ending up in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and the tiger which eats them all. The main part of the book is how Pi stays alive and it is very much a 'Robinson Crusoe' style narrative with him learning by trial and error how to get water and food, while working out how to deal with the tiger. His body suffers and he becomes blind at one stage, meeting another castaway. He arrives on an island built of algae. These latter phases the book becomes less credible, in contrast to the more gripping and sharply practical elements earlier. However, they add to the sense that Pi's ordeal has scrambled his thoughts or has led to hallucinations.

I can accept the slippage of chronology, but I think after the battle for survival the more fantastical elements towards the end made me feel a little betrayed. I guess Martell was aiming to sow doubt in our minds and undermine what was a reasonably credible story. Even then the Japanese officials who interview Pi disbelieve the whole thing and he makes up a completely different account for them. Thus, we see that Martell's intention was not really a survival story at all, but rather seeing how far he could push something with us still feeling it might be true. Though I guess I would have welcomed a more straightforward survival story and this toying with the reader is irritating, fortunately, I accepted the book more than if it had been the highly philosophical, metaphysical text I had expected from all the images.

'The Black Ice' by Michael Connelly

This is the second book in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. It is set some months after the first one, 'The Black Echo' (1992): http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-i-read-in-january.html so some of the same characters in the police force feature. It is a bit more deft than the previous book and Bosch does not seem obliged to sleep with every professional woman he comes across. Mexican women seem out of bounds to him, but that is not really a surprise in the context of this book. Much of the action happens in or on the border with Mexico. The country is portrayed incredibly negatively with almost everyone in the police corrupt, the towns shabby and stinking and the people, at best, disingenuous if not outright hostile. At times it feels very much like a stereotype portrayal which might have been tolerable in 1993, but will rile readers these days.

The story starts with an apparent suicide of a narcotics officer who has left a case for Bosch, though as before he struggles to get assigned not just to that but to any case. Another officer involved seeks quickly to leave the police and there seems to be a connection to a dead Mexican labourer who it appears has been brought from the border. The black ice of the title is a McGuffin, a mix of heroin, cocaine and PCP and initially, especially with references to Hawaii, is a bit of a distraction. The plot is complex enough with the mixing up of drug smugglers, a company producing sterile mayflies and a number of police officers who may be corrupt or just scared.

The action is handled reasonably well. As before, it is clear that Connelly was aiming for a modern version of the hard-boiled detective novels of the mid-20th Century, there is even an explicit reference to 'The Long Goodbye' (1953) by Raymond Chandler. There are various set-piece scenes, though at times Connelly goes too far. The involvement of bull fighting at various stages, seems part of his stereotype of Mexico and then seems levered in, especially when the champion bull attacks the helicopter Bosch is in. I guess Connelly felt he knew his immediate market, but at times it seems he is trying to be Chandler and Ernest Hemingway all wrapped into one, rather than Michael Connelly. As a result he ends up with what is now cliched when he does show that he can do better when subtler. There are interesting ideas with questions of identity and the fact that US Caucasians see Hispanics as a different race, even if they are US citizens, let alone of they come from Latin America, but Connelly while engaging with these a little, does not seem willing to press these issues.

Overall it is a reasonable thriller with some nice twists. However, you get a sense that somewhere in there is a better author who is being weighed down by feeling obliged to pay tribute to his heroes and to comply very much with US readers' expectations of how Mexico and Mexicans should, in their eyes, be portrayed. Added to these, especially in the early stages there are too many dead ends, which burden the book without adding genuine mystery. At times a better Connelly flashes out from beneath all this accretion and I can only hope that this version of him wins out in the subsequent books of his that I have been given.

Non-Fiction

'Bodyguard of Lies' by Anthony Cave Brown

This book at 947 pages long is the reason why I have read few other books this month. The book is supposed to be about the various deception techniques used by the British and Americans to aid them in fighting in Europe and North Africa. There are good sections on these issues, whether decoy activities such as Operation Mincemeat or tricks played with wireless signals or physical ones such as inflatable tanks and parachutist dolls to mislead enemy reconnaissance. There is good analysis of the 'weather war' aiming to keep the Germans ignorant of developing conditions and Operation Starkey the 1943 deception plan to keep the Germans thinking an invasion was imminent but which costs many lives among the French Resistance.

These elements are lost, however, in large swathes of text which is at best tangential to the story and often is irrelevant and covered better in other books with a different focus. Yes, the breaking of Enigma was important for showing the governments whether their deception schemes were working, but he gives far too much general information on the decrypting. The same goes for the German resistance to Hitler. He sees a single thread of groups among the German commanders and especially Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr. However, again, though the information they fed to the Allies confirmed whether the deceptions had worked, there was no need for the immense detail on these groups or their plots to arrest or kill Hitler, all covered better in other books. The same goes for the information about Field Marshal Rommel throughout and then the Normandy landings. Yes, deception played a big role in misleading Rommel and in aiding the landings, but we do not need to then read immense detail about Rommel's life, the landings and the advance into Normandy. By shovelling in all this general information on the war, Brown very much weakens the points he is trying to make.

I was rather cautious about it having read 'Unreliable Witnesses' by Nigel West back in December 2019: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/12/books-i-read-in-december.html which critiqued some of the claims that Brown makes in this book. In the end though, given how much Brown covers, those flaws were minor. Brown does write in a very populist style with sweeping, almost tabloid text at times. He also does nothing to hide his prejudices. He is very anti-French and says little good about any French leader and very few of the French resistance. He sees as 'crazed', Georg Elser the man who only failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler in November 1939 because due to bad weather, the dictator left the building a matter of minutes early; the explosion killed 3 'old fighters' of the Nazi Party. No-one else came this close to killing Hitler until July 1944 and Elser was only caught on the Swiss border.

The book is written very much for an American audience, so in contrast American commanders get a sympathetic hearing. There is sloppiness at points. Paul von Hindenburg did not become President of Germany until 1925 and never governed from Weimar. Part of his problem is that he started the book in 1965 and published in 1976. As he details in a chapter at the end, when he begun the book almost everything about his topic was still secret. It was not until 1974 that anything was said publicly about the breaking of Enigma or Bletchley Park, let alone many of the deception schemes, in part because there was worry that this would weaken the position in regards to the USSR during the Cold War. It seems that Brown already had one very generalised book ready and then in the mid-1970s when some details on his actual topic came to light, he rushed that into the book.

Given the timing of the publication, gaps in Brown's knowledge remain. He is oblivious to the difficulties Bletchley Park had in breaking the Shark variant of Enigma in 1943 and in fact portrays the Battle of the Atlantic in that phase contrary to what happened. He seems oblivious to Alan Turing's conviction for indecency in 1952, due to a homosexual relationship, at the time something illegal. Consequently he does not know about the medication Turing was compelled to then take which began shifting the traits of his gender. As a result, Turing's suicide by poisoning is a mystery to Brown which he simply puts down to the wartime stress the man faced.

For all these flaws, this could have been a good book if it had been reduced to 400 pages or so and Brown had focused on his supposed actual topic. There are aspects in here which are interesting and still do not turn up elsewhere. His questioning of how far Allied agents and resistance fighters were sacrificed to give credence to the deception plans is good. How the manipulation of wireless traffic and the use of double agents are also strong points. He does show how deception, especially Fortitude South which long convinced the Germans, even after D-Day, that there would be an Allied landing in the Pas-de-Calais reduced the German response to the Normandy invasion and so spared Allied lives. However, these are points you have to sift through all the general stuff, which while interesting, simply detracts from what should have been much more clearly the focus of this book.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest' by Stieg Larsson; read by Martin Wenner

This is the final book in Larsson's immensely popular Millennium trilogy which it has taken me over a year to get through, largely because the books provide diminishing returns. See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/05/books-i-listened-toread-in-may.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2019/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html for my reviews of the audio books of the previous two. While 'The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo' (2005) was an old fashioned murder mystery with sexual violence layered on top and 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' (2006) a clearer action-adventure, this third book is really a legal story. I would not say 'thriller' because though there is some conspiracy - a sub-section of the Swedish secret police trying to keep secrets around a Soviet defector - and some violence, most of the book is stodgy legal wrangling. Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist spends much of the novel in a hospital bed just two doors from her abusive father who had her sectioned and she tried to kill in the previous book. The proximity of the two seems ridiculous.

Apparently Larsson planned ten books in the series, before his death. However, it is apparent he had used everything up before this book. What we get is long stretches of people being very smug, whether the aged secret police, detectives who oppose or support Salander and the journalists who are working to have her sectioning reversed. That latter element perhaps now has some greater currency in the light of the Britney Spears wrangling, but it hardly makes an exciting or even engaging story. Larsson also comes across as rather pathetic in two regards. One is him constantly saying what piece of technology or software everyone is using, many of which must have been out-of-date even before the books were published. His attempts to give it some edgy currency become very irritating. The second is the character of journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Blomkvist is clearly an avatar of Larsson, a journalist aged 60 at the time of his death in 2004. Blomkvist is a philanderer, who despite not really attractive traits is able to get a whole string of women, some twenty years his junior to sleep with him and not to get fussed when he moves on to another. This is somehow seen as an asset rather than a flaw in the character and is rather galling as Larsson seems to miss the fact that Blomkvist is on the same spectrum as the men who abuse Salander. Instead, even independent, courageous Salander somehow cannot resist him.

This book lumbers on even in audio form, to the extent that by the time you reach the epilogue which wraps up one character, you have actually forgotten entirely about him. While the first book could be criticised as being over-rated, this third book certainly can have that charge levelled against it. The whole thing is really simply an over-stretched epilogue to 'The Girl Who Played with Fire'. How tedious the subsequent novels would have been one can only speculate. I imagine if Larsson had lived, the publishers may have even looked at this third book with askance and have sought heavy revisions.

Wenner does reasonably well in trying to bring life to this novel. There are so many characters of both genders and various ages, that he has to engage a whole range of voices. Consequently, while some are given a Swedish accent, many end up sounding like they come from regions of the UK. As before, Salander sounds very much like a woman from a London housing estate.

'Past Secrets' by Cathy Kelly: read by Niamh Cusack

When buying bundles of audio books in the way I used to, sometimes you get unexpected books in the mix. This was one of those which I guess a few years ago would have been termed 'chick lit'. It is focused on three female neighbours and one of their daughters, living or coming to live on a street in the Republic of Ireland. As the title suggests they each have a secret from their past, an illegitimate child, an affair and self-harm. Challenging circumstances lead them to reassess them keeping these things secret. Kelly attracts very opposite opinions, with some loving her work, it does sell well, and others condemning it for being too twee and unrealistic. The fact that Amber, the daughter of Faye, one of the three gets her art work bought up by a wealthy American and that Maggie, cheated on by her lecturer partner, finds a lovely local mechanic who she almost immediately has sexual relations with are seen as unrealistic. In addition, there is scepticism that people would hold to such secrets for so long and that, for example, the husband of the third woman, Christie gets so angry about an affair she had with a Polish artist 25 years earlier that he leave her.

I guess there is a challenge with these books. Kelly presumably wanted challenges for her characters but also did not want this to be a story of misery. She could have had it go that way with failures for all of the 4 protagonists, but I guess not many people would buy that. One point that does seem to anger many readers is that she has four stories running in parallel with minimal connection between them. As I know from my own writing there is a real hostility these days, no matter the genre, to authors having parallel stories rather than sticking to one, with, at most, sub-plots. I am not really sure why there is so much hostility to the parallel story approach, but it is certainly fuelled by online commentary which is very indignant if authors, even those as well established as Kelly, 'break the rules' which readers insist upon.

For what it is, the book is fine. It may not be a genre I would normally turn to, but I was not offended by it. I found it believable based on people and their behaviour I have seen in real life. The pacing was fine. There are happy endings, but that stopped the book being a tale of misery and to some degree any book with romance in has to stretch credibility as it is incredibly rare that any relationship starts or persists the way they are shown in novels. I am always interested to see what tropes go with different genres and one thing that was striking about this one is the level of detail of description. Paintings are clearly important to Kelly and you could paint her characters from the way she describes them and indeed all the houses in the street. I think some readers would find this unnecessary or even overwhelming, but it seems to fit reasonably well with the book.

Niamh Cusack is ideally cast to read this book, with accents that sound southern Irish but not sufficiently that they are impenetrable to listeners from other parts of the English-speaking world. Her American ones are reasonable too. She is good at getting the emotions across when this is called for.